News

Cristian joins the Bolam lab for about 3 months. He was born in Santiago de Chile. After the school, he studied aeronautic electronics in the Chilean Airforce Academy. In 1997 he left the airforce and worked in Lan Chile Airlines as an avionics specialist, team leader and supervisor. During this time his interest changed dramatically and in the 2004 began undergraduate studies in the University of Chile, in the Faculty of Science finishing my studies of Molecular Biotechnology Engineer in 2008. In 2009, in the same University and Faculty he started his graduate studies in the Molecular Biology and Neurosciences Doctoral program. He is now working on his doctoral thesis, which is related to the visual attentional capture mechanisms in birds. He will carry out electron microscopic analyses during his stay in Oxford.

After graduating in Physics at the University of Madrid in 2004, Álvaro Tejero-Cantero moved to the University of Munich (LMU) to complete a Masters Thesis (Hons.) on Quantum Entanglement at the Arnold Sommerfield Center for Theoretical Physics. He went on to work for two years as a professional: first at the German Aerospace Centre, where he managed an European FP6 research network and developed forecasts of air traffic for climate models, and later, as a Software Engineer for astronomical metadata at the European Southern Observatory.

For his PhD, started in 2008 at the Computational Neuroscience group of Prof. C. Leibold (Graduate School for Systemic Neuroscience and LMU Munich), he investigated how inhibition and excitation to hippocampal pyramidal cells intertwine during ripples in vitro and extended a theoretical model to assess how feedback inhibition improves the capacity of the brain for sequences of memories. Álvaro joins the group of Dr. D. Dupret where he will be studying how circuit dynamics in the hippocampal formation contribute to the processing of mnemonic information.

On Monday 7th November the Basal Ganglia labs were visited by a class of graduate art students studying a Masters level course in Art and Science, at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (University of the Arts London). These artists are interested in using science as an influence in their art practice.

A valuable component of the newly established research-based Masters course is the opportunity for artists to be exposed to and engage with scientists in various settings, including the laboratory. To demonstrate what a biomedical research lab is like, members of the Basal Ganglia lab shared with the group our research themes, techniques, equipment and experiences of being scientific researchers, through discussions and lab demonstrations.

Feedback was positive all round, with lots of interesting questions asked. While the artists appreciated the often beautiful imagery produced through our investigations, they were also fascinated by the information we can obtain through microscopic analyses and the craftsmanship involved in a lot of the meticulous preparation that goes into our lab work.

It is anticipated that a sub-group of these artists will continue to work with individuals in the Unit in a sustained collaboration, to develop outcomes relating to neuroscience and work done in the lab. This will hopefully lead to a public exhibition next year. Watch this space.

Colin McNamara graduated from the University of Limerick in 2006 with a BEng (Hons) in Computer Engineering. After graduation he worked as a hardware and software development engineer for the high performance signal processing integrated circuit company Analog Devices. In 2011 he completed an MSc in Neuroscience at the University of Oxford. This included two research projects. The first project investigated dendritic spine morphology in organotypic slice cultures of rat hippocampi (Dr Nigel Emptage's group, Department of Pharmacology). The second investigated the neuronal underpinning of pitch perception using multi-electrode extra cellular recordings from ferret auditory cortex (Prof Andy King's lab, Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics).Colin joined the unit as a member of Dr David Dupret's group in October 2011. For his DPhil he is studying hippocampal network activity associated with learning processes by means of large-scale extracellular recording techniques.